May 14, 2025 • 50 mins
The Harlem Globetrotters always beat the Washington Generals. It's just what they do. As of 1971, they’d done it 2,495 times. But for one gloriously confusing night that January, the underdogs got to raise their hands in victory. Today on Very Special Episodes, the untold story of the greatest upset in sports history.
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Very Special Thanks to Israel Gutierrez for lending his voice, and Peter Coughter for production support. Izzy and Peter have a new show out on our NBA slate about the rise of the Golden State Warriors. Check out Dub Dynasty wherever you get your podcasts.
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Hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason English
Written by Jake Rossen
Produced by Josh Fisher
Editing and Sound Design by Jonathan Washington
Mixing and Mastering by Jonathan Washington
Additional Editing by Mary Dooe
Original Music by Elise McCoy
Show Logo by Lucy Quintanilla
Executive Producer is Jason English
Got a question or comment? You can reach us at veryspecialepisodes@gmail.com.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
In the two thousand film Little Nikky, Adam Sandler plays
one of the Devil's three sons, sent to Earth to
retrieve his vastly more evil brothers. One is so vile,
so beyond any trace of goodness, that he uses his
other worldly powers to cause a natural disaster. He rigs
(00:41):
a Harlem Globetrotter's game in favor of their arch rivals,
the Washington Generals. And there's the scene in a nineteen
ninety five episode of The Simpsons where a despondent Krusty
the Clown loses big money betting on the Generals, shouting
that I thought the Generals were due. These jokes work
(01:04):
because we all innately understand one thing. The Globetrotters always
always beat the Generals. As of January nineteen seventy one,
they had done it two thousand, four hundred and ninety
five times, traveling from town to town, across the country
and globally. They are, after all, Globetrotters. The team has
(01:28):
made a basketball empire out of roundly trouncing the hapless Generals,
who are no match for either their basketball skills or
they're on court stunts think of the Globetrotters as Bugs
Bunny and the Generals as Almer Fut Like Elmer, they
can't really win, and they usually get humiliated in the process.
(01:53):
And just like no one can ever remember a cartoon
where Bugs gets his comeupance, you probably won't find anyone
who can remember a time they saw the globe Trotters lose.
They're never supposed to lose, they can't lose. But the
night of January fifth, nineteen seventy one is going to
(02:14):
be different. The Globetrotters are about to walk into a
small arena in a modest college town in Tennessee. They're
planning to do exactly what they've done for the past
umpteen games, win and embarrass the Generals, however, possible to
extend their wind streak to two thousand, four hundred and
(02:37):
ninety six. But by the time the final buzzer sounds,
the Globetrotters are ambling off the court with their heads down.
Kids in the crowd are tearing up, and the Generals
are both ecstatic and looking for the fastest way out
of the arena and then out of town. That's because
(03:00):
they've done the impossible They've defeated the Harlem Globetrotters, and
for the past half century, no one has ever been
exactly sure how they did it. How this ragtag team
of professional losers managed to snatch victory from the jaws
(03:21):
of perennial defeat. How they pulled off arguably the biggest upset.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
In sports history.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
There were no cameras, no television crew, no national newspapers
there to chronicle the contest or to answer the question,
how do you lose a rigged game? Welcome to very
special episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host, Danish Schwartz,
(03:50):
and this is the night the Harlem Globetrotters lost.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
Welcome back. I'm Jason English. She's Danish Wartz.
Speaker 5 (04:01):
Hi.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
Hi, he's Zarreen Burnette.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yoh.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
Have either of you ever seen the Globetrotters live?
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Yes?
Speaker 6 (04:06):
I have.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
When I was a kid, they came to Chicago. I
grew up in Chicago in the nineties. This is a
real basketball.
Speaker 7 (04:14):
Era totally, Oh my goodness, the best basketball air possibly.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
And also I didn't know they were from Chicago. I
learned it from this that they're not from Harlem.
Speaker 8 (04:23):
This is the episode I will say that I feel
like I drop this lower to random people I meet.
I'm like, you'll never guess, did you know? And then
I get into this whole episode. This is so much fun.
Speaker 7 (04:35):
Also, this is a fun one for me because I
always think of Harlem Globetrotters from their time on Scooby Doo.
So I was imagining the cartoon Harlem Globetrotters the whole time.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
They are actually human cartoons.
Speaker 7 (04:46):
Yeah, seriously.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
The Harlem Globetrotters were organized by founder Abe Sapristine and
played their first full season in nineteen twenty nine. They
didn't actually originate in Harlem, but in Chicago. When Sapristine
changed the name, they did it as a hint to
promoters or arenas that the team was comprised solely of
(05:12):
black athletes, the Conceit soon became a touring basketball troop
that was one part athletic endeavor and one part stage show.
After building a good lead against inferior teams, there was
opportunity for showmanship. The trotters might stuff the ball under
their jerseys. They might bounce it off an opponent's head,
(05:35):
or dribble while lying down. They might go full junior
high school and dropkick the ball into the net. But
if that's all you know about the Globe Trotters, you've
only scratched the surface.
Speaker 9 (05:48):
One of the things I didn't note was that in
the late nineteen forties they were unquestionably the best basketball
team in the world. They regularly beat white basketball teams,
including their most famous victories against the best team in
the NBA, the Minneapolis Lakers.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
That's Ben Green, then, is something of an expert in
Globe Trotter's lore.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
He's the author of the two.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Thousand and six book Spinning the Globe, and before he
started the book, he really had no idea how influential,
how good the Globetrotters really were.
Speaker 9 (06:24):
I believe that that had a direct connection to the
integration of the NBA. I mean, the Globe Trotters beat
the Lakers in forty eight and forty nine, and the
very next season the NBA integrated for the first time,
and the first black player to sign an NBA contract
was Sweetwater Clifton, the star center of the Globe Trotters.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
That's right. Despite the tricks, the Trotters were up for
sirious basketball. They played so called serious teams like the Lakers,
and they beat them. Legitimately, they'd play college teams, local teams, anyone.
They toured internationally and helped bring the game of basketball
(07:05):
to new country, some of which needed to have basketballs
or even the court itself shipped over. They even managed
to land Wilt Chamberlain, the legendary NBA player before he
went to that league. They were also wildly popular, so
much so that the NBA would ask the Trotters to
(07:27):
play doubleheader games. The NBA hoped the crowd that showed
up to watch the dazzling performance would stick around for
the league game. When the Trotters finally got on television,
they'd often draw a bigger audience than an NBA broadcast.
Speaker 9 (07:44):
They were legitimately a great basketball team. Back in the day,
they had a monopoly on the best black ball players
in the country. But by the nineteen fifties, when they
started going overseas, I would argue that they were the
most popular and successful sports franchise in the world. I
(08:05):
mean they were traveling all over the world. They were
going to Latin America to Europe. To set you, five
thousand people would show up in a rainstorm in Paris
to watch them practice, they would fill stadiums all over
the world.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
All that travel was one reason why the Trotters eventually
left competitive basketball largely behind them to focus more on
the antics. In addition to shipping balls, they needed to
ship opponents. Basketball was so new to some countries that
they simply couldn't provide any competitive players.
Speaker 6 (08:44):
So the games were not faked at all.
Speaker 9 (08:46):
But what happened was when they started going overseas, there
weren't any basketball teams that a lot of the countries
they were going to.
Speaker 6 (08:53):
I mean, the Globe Trinders introduced.
Speaker 9 (08:55):
Basketball all over the world, and so they had to
take a team with them, and that's when they started
developing basically these stooge teams.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
That shift also meant creating stars out of the guys
who could entertain as well as they played. Guys like
Goose Tatum, who was considered the standout of early Globetrotters,
was a born showman. Come the nineteen sixties, Meadow Lark Lemon,
the star of the team who was once benched when
(09:24):
Sirius basketball was needed, was now dominating the court. So
was Frederick curly Neil, another standout.
Speaker 9 (09:33):
He was being mom and one of the retired Globe
Trotters said that back in the seventies, in his heyday,
he said that he believed that Curly Neil and Muhammad
Ali were the two most recognizable sports figures in the world.
Curly because of his bald head and because he went
all over the world and was on TV with the.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Globe Shoors, and they also had a perpetual rival, the
Washington Generals. The Generals were founded in the early nineteen
fifties by Lewis Klotz, who was nicknamed Red. Klotz was
a good player, though short by basketball standards at about
five feet seven inches. He was a member of the
(10:15):
Baltimore Bullets in nineteen forty eight when they won the
Basketball Association of America Championship, a precursor to the NBA.
He had played for a few different teams who went
up against the Globe Shrotters before forming his own troupe,
which he named after General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Generals
(10:36):
were mainly white, mostly talented, and some were even NBA refugees.
Klotz pulled triple duty. He was team owner, team coach,
and player who could nail long range shots, shooting two
handed and he was able to keep games with the
Trotters competitive, but his main obligation, the team's main obligation,
(11:00):
was being the straight man to their famous rivals. If
both teams are clowning around, it's too much. You need
someone to bounce off of literally in the case of
dribbling off someone's head. So it was understood that while
the Generals could play a good game of basketball, they'd
back off a bit when the Globe Trotters had possession,
(11:23):
enough time for the Trotters to start executing what they
were best known for, the comic routines, which were called rems.
Speaker 6 (11:34):
There were all kinds of gags.
Speaker 9 (11:36):
The most famous one was the confetti in a bucket,
where they made it look like they were going to
throw a bucket of water on somebody in the crowd,
and it was full of confetti. But there was the
ball on a string on a rubber pan they would
come back when you shot a free throw, and just
the wobbly balls. And they'd played going to this baseball
thing where they were actually acting like they were playing baseball.
(11:57):
So in between playing regular good basketball, then there was
all this funny stuff what they called the rims.
Speaker 6 (12:06):
The gag that the Globe Trotters did.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Think of it this way. If the Globetrotter games were musicals,
Reams would be the big musical numbers, all the crazy
ball handling, all the goofing off, and they didn't have
to worry about running up against real defense. The Generals
were also prohibited from pass interference when the ball was
tossed to meadow lark lemon. Together, these restrictions made it
(12:33):
all but impossible for the Generals to mount a victory.
Speaker 9 (12:37):
So they would play in you know, every quarter. There'd
be the first four or five minutes they would just
play basketball, and you know, the Generals would play as
hard as they could as well, but there was like
a signal they knew at a certain point in every
quarter that they would go into this funny stuff, you know,
and that was what they became most famous for them.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
In twenty twenty, a former General named Mickey Greenberg said
that the games could be competitive for a bit before
the Trotters would inevitably take the victory. He could recall
only one time, at a show in Flint, Michigan, in
the late nineteen sixties, that the owner of the Trotters
told the Generals that they could really try to win.
(13:22):
Mickey said that switching from cooperating with the Trotters to
really trying to beat them was hard. The Generals lost
that night, like most every night they played and lost
to the Trotters everywhere from Madison Square Garden to a
leper colony in the Philippines. While Klotz himself said he
(13:44):
never went out to lose any games or was ever
told to lose a game, the loss is piled up, end, up,
and up. You'll recall that by the time nineteen seventy
one rolled around, the Trotters had won two thousand, four
hundred and ninety five games in a row. Their last
(14:04):
recognized loss had come back in nineteen sixty two against
a college team. There were isolated reports of the Generals
winning a game here or there very early on, including
an incident where the scoreboard malfunctioned in nineteen fifty seven,
but no one could really confirm it. Because the Trotters
(14:26):
were more of a show than a sports team, no
one really bothered to keep a running tally or box score,
and come the nineteen sixties, it didn't really matter. The
Generals were Charlie Brown trying to kick a football. The
Globe Trotters were a team of Lucy's pulling it away
at the last second.
Speaker 9 (14:48):
They built this long term business relationship that became really
at that point.
Speaker 6 (14:55):
From that point.
Speaker 9 (14:56):
On, neither the Trotters nor the Generals were playing anybody else.
They just played each other, and the Globe Trotters always
won and the General's always lost.
Speaker 6 (15:08):
That was just kind of the nature of the world
at that point.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Which brings us to Martin, Tennessee, on January fifth, nineteen
seventy one, the date when the natural order.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Of things got turned upside down.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
As a touring show, the Globetrotters were more than willing
to visit smaller towns and venues, which is how the
team wound up at the University of Tennessee at Martin,
a somewhat rural campus in the modestly sized town of Martin.
Martin is currently home to the Tennessee Soybean Festival. At
(15:49):
the time, there were roughly five thousand students.
Speaker 10 (15:53):
It was basically do what you want to do. I mean,
we had some recreation things right off of campus.
Speaker 5 (16:01):
There.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
We had a couple of areas where they had.
Speaker 10 (16:04):
Some many machines and Pool Taie Wolves had a movie
theater and Martin, which was about three blocks from the campus.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
That's Jerry Carpenter.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Jerry was a UTM student who graduated back in nineteen
sixty six. Growing up on a rural farm, he was
the first in his family to attend college. Later, he
began working there as a coach for the golf team
and in other sports programs. Like a lot of Martin residents,
he was intrigued by the Trotters coming to town.
Speaker 10 (16:37):
I had watched them on TV that you know, was extensive.
I got married in sixty six and started to work
here in sixty eight. So whenever they came, you know,
I said, woll it's bally something to go see.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
So I got tickets for me.
Speaker 10 (16:51):
And I had a little brother that was seventeen years
younger than me, and he was about nine or ten
years old at that time.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
Martin isn't exactly a hotbed of entertainment.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
At the time.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
It was a dry town where purchasing alcohol wasn't legal.
Well kind of.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
It's still a dry county.
Speaker 10 (17:11):
We don't have package liquor stores in Wiky County. I
mean you still had your local night spots and all
that you know where you could get that. But now
Folk in Kentucky was only about eight or nine miles away,
and they had three or four package stores over there.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
The Globe Trotters touched down on January fifth, which fell
on a Tuesday. Thanks to their popularity, they managed to
attract thousands of fans to the arena, including Jerry and
his younger brother.
Speaker 10 (17:42):
It was just a small arena, but all of sat
were just right on the floor. I mean, you were
just right there. It was a packed crowd.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
The fans stared at the shiny floor of the court
as the Globe Trotters came in to the sounds of
Sweet Georgia Brown, their theme song and anthem.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
They were greeted with cheers.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
The generals probably were not, we need to say probably because,
as we've mentioned, Sports Illustrated didn't cover the hundreds of
Globetrotter's games played each year, the local press didn't cover it,
and the student press was supposed to be on vacation
that week on account of the holiday. So here's what
(18:22):
we know based on recollections, including Jerry's. But bear in
mind that accounts of this game have usually come well
after the fact. Relying on memory, and memory, as we
all know, is fallible.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
This was fifty four years ago.
Speaker 10 (18:39):
What amazed me was the shots that they took and
they hid it. I mean, I just hadn't seen any
of that, even in the college games that I walked.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
That was what was amazing everybody.
Speaker 10 (18:51):
And then of course it was so entertaining with everything
that they did and talking and carrying on and everything.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Still, there are some things most accounts agree on. For
one thing, something had been building earlier that season and
the Generals had taken the Trotters into overtime another game,
the Trotters won only via a buzzer beater. Tonight, the
Globe Trotters were up to their usual tricks. They dribbled
(19:19):
circles around the hapless Generals, antagonized the referee, and played
to the crowd and just for kicks. We asked our
basketball reporter friend, Izzie Gutierrez of ESPN to recreate the broadcast.
Speaker 11 (19:35):
The Globe Trotters are up to their usual antics, interacting
with the crowd and what appears to be a total
disregard for their opponents. Here comes metal Lark Lemon hitting
a shot from half court. The Generals are helpless to
do anything about it. This is truly the worst team
in all of sports.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Of course, the Globetrotters were often aided by the official
who traveled with the teams and held a clear pro
Globe Trotter bias.
Speaker 10 (20:03):
I won't tell you once I stuck out in my mind,
especially as I went along later on in life and I.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Became a referee. A referee wasn't very good. You know.
Speaker 10 (20:16):
He wasn't exactly straight up on all his call and everything.
As I got older and everything, I thought back on it.
He was part of the show, and of course whatever
he did was arc medalle Ark made it entertaining.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
At halftime, the Globe Trotters were up by twenty to
twenty three points depending on the source, which was pretty
typical of how they fared against the Generals. It was
another route of beating a kind of torture. To be
a Generals fan, if there ever were such a thing,
was to make peace with disappointment.
Speaker 10 (20:50):
I guess I's county naive about the Globe Trotters. I
knew that they always won. Of course, being a young guy,
didn't understand all that that time, But I later on
found out that more or less. The end of the
game has already been decided for ever throw the basketball
hard playing.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
But starting in the third quarter, something began to shift.
Speaker 11 (21:14):
Meadowlark Lemon is looking a little off tonight. That was
an easy layup, but it bounced off the rim. The
Generals have the ball, red cloths scores.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
Meadow Lark, who could sink half court shots the way
normal people can get a lot of paper into a
trash can, couldn't touch the net. The Trotters were still
doing their thing, using the ball as a prop for
their comedy, but the Generals seemed bound and determined to
do what they could hardly ever manage, turn this into
(21:46):
an actual game of basketball.
Speaker 11 (21:49):
It's the end of the third quarter and I can't
believe I'm saying this, but the Generals have closed the
gap against the Globetrotters. This is no longer a game
between professionals and junior varsity players, but an actual even match,
and it's happening right here in Martin, Tennessee.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
The crowd had a sense of change in the air,
and probably a little bit of confusion. Weren't the Globe
Trotters too good to touch? Weren't the Generals just well
stooges in the fourth quarter. The Generals had an answer.
If it wasn't clear already, they didn't come to lose,
(22:24):
not tonight.
Speaker 11 (22:26):
With just a few minutes left in this game, the
Generals have taken a twelve point lead.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Our highly fictitious announcer is correct. The Generals moved ahead
of the Trotters by twelve points late in the game,
not only erasing the comfortable lead the Trotter's built up,
but putting them way behind. And that could mean only
one thing.
Speaker 11 (22:52):
If the Globe Trotters want to take this game, they're
going to have to limit the theatrics and focus on
playing basketball.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Metal lark Lemon.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Drives to the basket. That's good for two. And you
can tell.
Speaker 11 (23:05):
He's feeling the pressure because he didn't stop to pull
down the referees pants.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
As the seconds ticked down.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Whether they realized it or not, the crowd was watching
one of the most suspenseful Globetrotter's games ever. The Trotters surged,
closing that twelve point gap and taking a one point lead,
making the score ninety nine to ninety eight with just
seconds remaining.
Speaker 11 (23:31):
The General's half possession if the clock winds down, they
have just one last chance to score and make history
for the losingest franchise in sports history.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
During a timeout, Red who is by this point fifty
years old, demands the ball. Whether he wanted the glory
or just wanted to avoid a more expendable player getting
canned for making a shot, well, who knows. Clops evades
several Globetrotters pivots, and roughly twenty feet out from the basket, shoots.
Speaker 11 (24:05):
And it's in the General lead one hundred to ninety nine.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
The Generals knew there was just one opportunity to take
the lead. Red Klotz would later say he made the
shot because he was afraid another General's player might not
know what to do miss on purpose. No, that wasn't
what Red Klotz was about. He wanted to play a
sincere game, but he wasn't home free. The Globetrotters take over.
Speaker 11 (24:34):
With three seconds left, Meadowlark Lemon eyes the basket and
takes his shot just as time is about to expire,
and it's no good.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
The Globetrotter's fall. The Washington Generals have won. I don't
believe what I just saw after meadow Lark missed, the
ball went out of bounds, and possession went to the Generals,
who let the time run out. The scoreboard displayed the
most improbable score of all time. The Generals had won
(25:03):
one hundred to ninety nine. So what does Jerry remember.
Speaker 10 (25:09):
I just remember that they took a shot, and the
globe Trotters had been clowning around as usual and everything,
and I think the Generals made a little run and
they made that last shot, and I thought, oh, they
got a score. And I don't remember who shot for
the Globetrotters on the last shot, but they didn't make it,
(25:30):
and the game.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Was over with. Everybody just said, okay, they lost.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
The mood in the campus area was one of confusion.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
The Generals did what?
Speaker 3 (25:41):
But the expression on the faces of the Globetrotters was
all too real. They're a little shot and the Generals, well,
they're elited, but they're also not the heroes in the
eyes of fans. Some accounts, including those of players, mentioned
kids in the audience crying. Others mentioned the crowd booing
(26:02):
this happened. The Globetrotters fell to the Generals, but one
question remains how the fallout of the loss to the
Generals lingered over the next several weeks. One globe Trotter
(26:24):
recalled he thought the entire team was going to get fired.
As the story goes, George Gillette, then owner of the Globetrotters,
boarded a plane so he could personally chastise the players
for losing. This was more than a defeat, This was
jeopardizing a lucrative franchise. Fans came to see the Globetrotters
(26:46):
embarrass the Generals, not get embarrassed themselves. But the team
soon had an idea. They certainly could have buried the
loss entirely. Again, no one was really around to make
it a national story. The team could have simply opted
to ignore it and move on. Instead, they did the opposite.
(27:08):
In an interview with a journalist in Shreveport, Louisiana, just
a week later, the team's business manager, Chuck McKay, accepted
the loss quote they kind of surprised the Globetrotters when
a few of the former collegians scored in high figures.
McKay said, why acknowledge it for a good reason. Knowing
(27:30):
the Globetrotters could lose kept the games more interesting. It
was no longer a foregone conclusion that trotters would succeed
pay to see a game, and maybe, just maybe the
underdogs could claw and scratch their way to another upset.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
But how did it happen in.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
The first place. Globe Trotter's historians, players, and eyewitnesses have
offered differing accounts over the decades. Like a Globe Trotter's Raschiman,
everyone seems to have a different reason for how the
generals pulled off the upset of the century.
Speaker 10 (28:09):
I thank you for something that just slipped up on
the end. And maybe it was a shot made it
wasn't supposed to be made, or somebody was supposed to
be guarding somebody and they didn't. You know, that's just
something that happened.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Of course, the best people to ask would be the
players themselves. Unfortunately, many from both teams have passed away
in the preceding decades. We reached out to the National
Basketball Retired Players Association, which counts the teams among their alumni,
but no one surfaced who had any recollection of the game,
(28:44):
but some did have their perspective on the game. Documented.
One story that keeps getting repeated is that somehow, somewhere
the teams got into a personal dispute. It comes from
Rory Keevil, a Washington General's player who spoke with journalist
Tom Condon of the Hartford Current in two thousand. Kievel
(29:07):
said the travel schedule had been long and that the
two teams were quote a little chapped at one another,
though he doesn't recall why. Remember, the Globetrotters were the stars.
The Generals made a fraction of what the Trotters got.
They had underdog energy. Maybe being paid less finally got
(29:29):
to them one night. Ben Green isn't sure about the
animosity between the teams, and some other elements of these
stories don't quite add up. One player remembers Globetrotter's owner
Abe Sapristein, threatening to fire the Generals in the locker
room afterward, but Abe Sapristein had died five years earlier.
(29:53):
Ben does believe there was animosity between the Globetrotters, well
one Globetrotter and everyone else. Ben believes meadow Lark Lemon
wasn't well liked by the rest of the Trotters, that
he took too much of his style from his predecessor,
goose Tatum and wasn't a very good straight basketball player.
(30:15):
He had an ego, a chiff on his shoulder. It
was in many ways the meadow Lark Show, and meadow
Lark liked it that way. And according to Ben, the
night in Martin was a night when meadow Lark wanted
to stick it to the generals.
Speaker 9 (30:33):
The generals are gonna let the Glow Trotters win. And
then basically metal Arc showed his ass. This is kind
of the way we had Klass described it. Metal Arc
just said, Hey, we're going to really take it to
the generals. So he wanted to make a point and
read kind of said, okay, let's bring it on. So
(30:55):
he told his players, let's play to win, and that's
why it happened. It all happened because of Pedal Ark,
and at that point they started playing real basketball version.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
Meadow Lark is throwing down the gauntlet. Let's drop the
theatrics and play for real. Maybe because, as roy Kievil said,
there was some personal beef and maybe he and the
rest of the Trotters weren't prepared for the Generals to
put up a fight, leading to their undoing. Others put
(31:29):
the blame for the loss on the absence of Curly Neil,
the Globe Trotter's other marquee player. But Neil's presence there
is a question mark. Neil himself told Ben Green he
wasn't playing. In other interviews he places himself there fairness
to Curly. When you play hundreds of games a year,
(31:50):
you probably don't know which town you were in. We
can also look to the memories of Red Klotz. Red,
like many of the players, had passed, but his account
of the game was documented in the book The Legend
of Red Klotz by author Tis him Kelly and in
an interview with Ben Green. In Red's telling, the Globe
(32:12):
Trotters were having an off night, looking as sluggish. A
General's player named Sam Sawyer was guarding meadow lark Lemon
exceptionally well, shutting down his rapid fire offense. The Generals
were motivated, grabbing rebound after rebound. The rim, according to Klotz,
was as big as a garbage candle lid. That night,
(32:35):
the Trotters couldn't get going, but the Generals couldn't miss
it was, Klotz remembered, as if they had just killed
Santa Claus, but no in.
Speaker 9 (32:46):
Read, Red would want to take the last shot because
he knew he was good and he had a complete
confidence that he would hit it.
Speaker 6 (32:53):
So he hits the shot.
Speaker 9 (32:55):
The buzzer finally sounds, and the way he told the story,
there's just this dead silence, like the crowds is just
in disbelief.
Speaker 6 (33:06):
They don't know what's happened.
Speaker 9 (33:07):
Nobody knows what to do because there's no script for this.
Speaker 6 (33:13):
That wait, the game is over.
Speaker 9 (33:15):
In the globe, chatter's left and read was afraid there
might be a riot or something.
Speaker 6 (33:20):
He' tell me kind of rushed his team off the court.
He said, let's get out of here.
Speaker 9 (33:25):
Let's get back in the dress room, because he was
afraid of what might happen.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
There's another source of information on the game. It comes
from a twenty eighteen story from the University of Tennessee
at Martin Campus News, which looked back at the game
in a retrospective and interviewed several people who were there,
both utm students and residents. The picture is interesting according
(33:53):
to married couple Dick and Barbara Hutcherson School alumni, who
went to the game with their young son. The Trotters
never took a big lead, the game remained competitive, and
the couple felt that well, it was all part of
the show. It was supposed to be suspenseful before the
Trotters pulled off the victory. And when Red Clots hit
(34:15):
that game winning shot, well, the Hutchersons felt that maybe
Red wasn't supposed to make that shot. Others in attendance
felt that way too. It was a mistake. The Trotters
were just goofing off a little too much. And the
shot that Lemon took that could have sensed a victory,
(34:35):
he took a half court hook shot, hard for even
a Globe Trotter to nail. Now, all of these accounts
have one thing in common. They're trying to recall details
of a game that's way in the rear view. To
find out what really happened that night, you'd need a
time machine. You'd need someone who was jotting down whatever
(34:59):
details they could as soon as the game was over.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
But, like we keep.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Saying, covering Globe Trotters wasn't really part of anyone's sports beat.
But then we got an interesting email from the good
people at UTM, the people who helped connect us with
Jerry Carpenter. Their public relations person had dug up something
no one had seen in over fifty years, and it
(35:27):
kind of blew our minds. The Globetrotters definitely lost that night,
but they didn't play the Washington Generals. At the time
the Globe Trotters visited the UTM Arena in January nineteen
(35:47):
seventy one, Aaron Tatum was a freshman. He was also
writing for The Valette, the school's newspaper.
Speaker 5 (35:55):
I was on the campus newspaper the first year. Within
a couple of months I was freshman, signed the newly
created position of Fine arts editor and say that I
knew a lot about fine arts, but as it turned out,
they sort of immersed myself went to New York and
saw all your museums up there for about a week
(36:16):
or two around Christmas to get myself a bit educated.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
That to Aaron, under normal circumstances, Aaron wouldn't be the
guy to dispatch to any sporting event, let alone the
Globe Trotters. But on this night, the Valette was down
one sports reporter.
Speaker 5 (36:34):
Just to bring it into the focus, here was really
something that the sports editor came to me at the
last minute. He says, our sports reporter is sick or
having to leave campus, something was going on with his family.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
I can't remember.
Speaker 5 (36:52):
Came to me about an hour or two before the game,
and I'd already seen the Globe Trotters, I guess three
or four years before, and sort of was tempted to
go ahead and pay for a ticket, but I'm pretty
conservative and pretty cheap. First question Dennis was, well, that
means I'm going to get in free.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
The answer was yes. Aaron played a little basketball when
he was younger, and had been a fan of the
Philadelphia seventy six ers. He knew enough about the game
to get by. What's remarkable about his attendance is that,
unlike virtually everyone else watching, he was really paying attention
(37:31):
and had to write it all down afterward, so, some
fifty years on, even though he doesn't remember a whole
lot about it now, the other Aaron, the young reporter.
Aaron scribbled things down right away. It was published just
days later in the January thirteenth, nineteen seventy one edition
(37:54):
of The Vallette under the headline Trotter's Net more humor
than points, and as far as we know, it's the
most accurate account of the game ever recorded.
Speaker 5 (38:06):
And I've I think I featured that in what I
turned in to the paper, But I do recall we
had an advisor for the paper who really believed in
the truism of if dog bites man, it's not a story.
If man bites dog, it's a story. And I believe that.
But he was excessive about He says we got a
(38:27):
lead with the fact that they got beat.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Maybe the most interesting thing about Aaron's account is that
the Globe Trotters didn't play the Generals. Well. They did,
let me explain. Oftentimes Redklots would have his team don
the jerseys and the name of another franchise, and an
effort to mix things up make it seem like the
(38:51):
Trotters were playing a whole league of teams instead of
the same happless opponents every night. Sometimes they were the
Boston Shamrocks, other times the Baltimore Rockets. In Martin they
were appearing as the New Jersey Reds. But what about
the game itself. Here's Aaron reading an excerpt of his story.
Speaker 5 (39:13):
Curly Neil displayed his famous dribbling act for a few
seconds in the fourth quarter and scored on some long
shots from as far back as the mid court line.
Meadowlark was a continuous clatter of chatter, specializing many successful
over the shoulder shots. The game was, without it out,
fixed for the Globe Trotters to win, but this time
the plan was a little too late.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Wait, Curly Neil, the Curly Neil that wasn't supposed to
have been there that night.
Speaker 5 (39:40):
I think I distinctly remember Curly Neil being there. I mean,
he's not someone you could forget easy.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Not really Curly. Remember it was once compared to Mohammad
Ali on the fame scale. That's important because Curly's absence
has been widely cited as a key reason for the Trotters.
Losing his presence makes the Generals or Reds win even
more impressive. Aaron also mentions the Trotters had a twenty
(40:10):
point head in the third quarter, which tracks with other accounts.
They were well on their way to winning, like they
always do. But here's what Aaron saw that provides what
might be the single biggest reason for the Trotters coming
up short that night.
Speaker 5 (40:28):
It's quite obvious that the announcer who traveled with the
troop along with the referee and the opposing team, hopes
to give some extra time to allow the Globe Totters
to win. As soon as the buzzer sounded after a
series of timeouts in one second left, the announcer called
back to play himself as soon as he saw the
Globe Trotters weren't able to get the fall.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
This is another part of the Globe Trotter's lore. The
clock would often be stopped during their reams, along with
other timekeeping manipulation to give the Trotters an edge, but
for some reason it wasn't quite working that night, so
by the end they were literally trying to not only
stop the clock, but wind it back entirely.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
This tracks with what.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
Red Cloths once said that the Globetrotters argued no one
had touched an inbound pass and the clock shouldn't have
run out. Apparently, the Globetrotters gave themselves a do over,
one final chance to keep their record intact.
Speaker 5 (41:31):
The Reds were still in obsession from their own court.
The play was called back, tried again, but the same
action took place and the game was over.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
The problem it didn't work. The Trotters got two chances
to win the game two and they flopped both times.
Would a third restart have been too egregious even for
the Harlem Globetrotters. Maybe, or maybe the team felt it
was finally time to acknowledge the generals. While read as
(42:01):
worthy adversaries, they played a good and real game of basketball.
And what's noteworthy about their victory isn't just that they
beat the vastly better team. They beat the vastly better
team that could literally get a second chance when things
weren't going their way. Their aura of invincibility was shattered,
(42:25):
at least for the crowd in attendance. Did it matter
for the Trotters?
Speaker 2 (42:30):
Not really.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
They went on to have another spectacularly successful decade, touring,
doing a television variety show, and then being relegated somewhat
to the sidelines. As the NBA grew and grew, It
wasn't so much that they didn't look like the NBA
as much as the NBA started to look like the Globetrotters.
(42:53):
Here's Ben Green.
Speaker 9 (42:54):
Like, the NBA was playing Globetrotter basketball. You know, they
were running the fast break and shooting from downtown, and
there were dunks and all this really high flying style
that was really Globetrotter basketball. The ABA, the American Basketball Association,
was much more like the Globetrotters, and they were sort
(43:14):
of a transition to when the NBA began to play
that way as well. But eventually, like you were getting
to you didn't have to go to see the Globetrotters
to see dunks and three point shots and entertaining basketball
because the NBA was doing that as well.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
They wouldn't lose again until nineteen ninety five, when a
loss ended an eight thousand, eight hundred and twenty nine
game winning streak that began with the very next game
against the Generals back in nineteen seventy one. That loss
didn't come at the hands of the Generals, however, but
to an all star team of former NBA players at
(43:54):
a game in Vienna, Austria, led.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
By Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
Speaker 3 (43:58):
But that nineteen seventy one win mattered plenty to the
Generals and to Red Klotz. Red always wanted to be
the Trotters, always suited up with that on his mind.
A combination of talent, luck, and some unsuccessful cheating gave
him his moment, one Hugh relished. It was also one
(44:22):
the people won't soon forget, even if some of the
details are lost to time. Jerry Carpenter hasn't forgotten, nor
has Aaron Tatum, now, a novelist whose book Shakespeare's Secrets
we promised to mention, and which uses scholarly evidence to
explore the idea Shakespeare didn't write all of his own work.
Speaker 5 (44:44):
I'm not going to reveal who our man is because
that'll take away part of the excitement of going out
and buying the novel and reading it yourself. Right, I'm
not going to I'm not going to say it on.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
The air here.
Speaker 3 (44:57):
Before every game against the Trotters, Red Klotts told his
team the same thing, let's go win in Martin, Tennessee.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
They finally did.
Speaker 10 (45:08):
It's a lot of fun to watch as the years
have gone on. Say, I saw the one game but
the Globe Trotter's lost.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
I was there.
Speaker 10 (45:16):
I've talked to some people as I refereed basketball in
the area. You know, did you happen to be at
the game when the Globetrotter's playing, and a lot of
people from the towns around here. Yes, I was there.
I saw the game and enjoyed it very much.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
There's no evidence the Generals Ever beat the Globetrotters again.
Their record, which can only be estimated sands at over
seventeen thousand losses. Statistically, there's probably a better chance of
being hit by lightning than seeing the team ever squeak
out another victory. But for one glorious night in rural Tennessee,
(45:55):
the underdogs got to raise their hands in victory. There
was just one drawback. Martin, being a dry town, didn't
have any champagne available.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
The Generals had to settle for soda.
Speaker 4 (46:10):
There are so many sports stories about someone coming in
off the bench and filling in for an injured player
and making history. And Tom Brady stepped in for Drew
Bledsoe and Luke Garrick stepping in for Wally Pip. I
want to put our guy, Aaron Tatum of the student
newspaper in there.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
He was supposed to be there.
Speaker 4 (46:28):
No, he is the reason.
Speaker 3 (46:30):
We know did a great job too. That's real journalism,
is what that is. That's journal on a bench stepping
in covering the game.
Speaker 7 (46:38):
You barely understand the fine arts reporter.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
I loved it.
Speaker 3 (46:41):
Saren, are we casting anyone?
Speaker 6 (46:43):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (46:43):
Yeah? Actually I did?
Speaker 7 (46:45):
I have some casting on this because I loved Red Klotz,
the coaching player for the Washington Generals, and I was like,
the whole line that was it was as if Klotz
remembered they had just killed Santa Claus. I was like, okay,
I got to do right by Red Klotz. So I
picked Paul Rudd. Now just picture him in fifties basketball
shorts and Converse high tops. I'm right, so extig me,
(47:05):
yeah boom, and now he's like out there shooting like
the granny shots. So that was my pick for him.
For Metal Lark Lemon, I went with Jamie Fox with
a big afro. I thought he's got the right physicality.
And then for Curly Neil, I thought Bukeem Woodbine, who
is by the way from Harlem, even the Globetrotters are not.
And then for Aaron Tatum, the school newspaper reporter, I thought,
(47:25):
this is just a fun one for me. Tom Holland
who played Spider Man, but we never got to see
him as a reporter, so now we get to see
him as a reporter.
Speaker 3 (47:32):
So there you go, Wow, kid reporter I love.
Speaker 8 (47:34):
I mean, he's like a probably like thirty five at
this point.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
It's always going to be a kid good Totally.
Speaker 7 (47:40):
Do you guys, are any very special characters from this one?
Speaker 8 (47:42):
You know what I'm gonna go, Tatum. I love a
journalist taking notes. I love like I started.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
When I graduated college, like not ever like a real journalist,
but in in journalism, and so I really do admire that,
like boots on the ground, like I'm getting a source,
I'm reporting a story because I saw it firsthand.
Speaker 1 (48:01):
Totally.
Speaker 7 (48:02):
I was imagining the steno Patty's flipping through to write
his notes. In My very special character was Will Chamberlain
as a Harlem glowstrotterer.
Speaker 1 (48:09):
I was like, are you kidding me?
Speaker 7 (48:10):
And also I was having fun imagining if they ever
lost while he was on the team. I don't think
you could ever live that down.
Speaker 8 (48:15):
I remember my husband loves basketball, and I did want
to ask him whether it was against the rules in
real basketball to give a player on your team uppies
to lift him up so that he could jump. And
it turns out, yes, that is against the rule. You're
not allowed to give a player on your own team uppies.
Speaker 7 (48:32):
It's a great question, though. I love that question.
Speaker 4 (48:34):
I'm going to give my very special character to the
many people on eBay. I've just discovered who make knockoff
Washington General's throwback jerseys.
Speaker 6 (48:44):
You.
Speaker 4 (48:44):
I was wondering, now we need to add some point
level up where we're getting prop contents for each of
these recordings. And I'd love to get all of you
Washington General's outfits. And if we get that budget allowance,
there are plenty of eBay sellers ready to.
Speaker 7 (49:00):
Meet that need.
Speaker 8 (49:01):
Do they make them in onesie sizes? Can I have
a large yes?
Speaker 4 (49:06):
So that we might need to just get very special
episodes is made by some very special people. Today's episode
is a Jake Rosson special. Jake have written many of
our most popular episodes, including Et and Me about the
eleven year old who helped bring Et to life, and
Super Streaker about the Tom Brady of streaking. I've mentioned
(49:27):
this before, I think, but Jake wrote a book called
Action Park. The subtitle is Fast Times, Wild Rides and
the Untold Story of America's most Dangerous Amusement Park. You
should get it for your summer reading list. Our show
is hosted by Danis Schwartz, Zaren Burnett, and Jason English.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Our producer is Josh.
Speaker 4 (49:46):
Fisher Editing and sound design by Jonathan Washington. Mixing and
mastering by Jonathan Washington. Additional editing by Mary Doo, original
music by Elise McCoy. Show logo by Lucy Kintonia. Our
executive producer is Jason English. You'd like to email the
show tell us about the time you were seriously injured
at Action Park. You can reach us at Very Special
(50:08):
Episodes at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
I'll board the Action part. Emails to Jake.
Speaker 4 (50:13):
Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
In the two thousand film Little Nikky, Adam Sandler plays
one of the Devil's three sons, sent to Earth to
retrieve his vastly more evil brothers. One is so vile,
so beyond any trace of goodness, that he uses his
other worldly powers to cause a natural disaster. He rigs
(00:41):
a Harlem Globetrotter's game in favor of their arch rivals,
the Washington Generals. And there's the scene in a nineteen
ninety five episode of The Simpsons where a despondent Krusty
the Clown loses big money betting on the Generals, shouting
that I thought the Generals were due. These jokes work
(01:04):
because we all innately understand one thing. The Globetrotters always
always beat the Generals. As of January nineteen seventy one,
they had done it two thousand, four hundred and ninety
five times, traveling from town to town, across the country
and globally. They are, after all, Globetrotters. The team has
(01:28):
made a basketball empire out of roundly trouncing the hapless Generals,
who are no match for either their basketball skills or
they're on court stunts think of the Globetrotters as Bugs
Bunny and the Generals as Almer Fut Like Elmer, they
can't really win, and they usually get humiliated in the process.
(01:53):
And just like no one can ever remember a cartoon
where Bugs gets his comeupance, you probably won't find anyone
who can remember a time they saw the globe Trotters lose.
They're never supposed to lose, they can't lose. But the
night of January fifth, nineteen seventy one is going to
(02:14):
be different. The Globetrotters are about to walk into a
small arena in a modest college town in Tennessee. They're
planning to do exactly what they've done for the past
umpteen games, win and embarrass the Generals, however, possible to
extend their wind streak to two thousand, four hundred and
(02:37):
ninety six. But by the time the final buzzer sounds,
the Globetrotters are ambling off the court with their heads down.
Kids in the crowd are tearing up, and the Generals
are both ecstatic and looking for the fastest way out
of the arena and then out of town. That's because
(03:00):
they've done the impossible They've defeated the Harlem Globetrotters, and
for the past half century, no one has ever been
exactly sure how they did it. How this ragtag team
of professional losers managed to snatch victory from the jaws
(03:21):
of perennial defeat. How they pulled off arguably the biggest upset.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
In sports history.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
There were no cameras, no television crew, no national newspapers
there to chronicle the contest or to answer the question,
how do you lose a rigged game? Welcome to very
special episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host, Danish Schwartz,
(03:50):
and this is the night the Harlem Globetrotters lost.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
Welcome back. I'm Jason English. She's Danish Wartz.
Speaker 5 (04:01):
Hi.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
Hi, he's Zarreen Burnette.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yoh.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
Have either of you ever seen the Globetrotters live?
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Yes?
Speaker 6 (04:06):
I have.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
When I was a kid, they came to Chicago. I
grew up in Chicago in the nineties. This is a
real basketball.
Speaker 7 (04:14):
Era totally, Oh my goodness, the best basketball air possibly.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
And also I didn't know they were from Chicago. I
learned it from this that they're not from Harlem.
Speaker 8 (04:23):
This is the episode I will say that I feel
like I drop this lower to random people I meet.
I'm like, you'll never guess, did you know? And then
I get into this whole episode. This is so much fun.
Speaker 7 (04:35):
Also, this is a fun one for me because I
always think of Harlem Globetrotters from their time on Scooby Doo.
So I was imagining the cartoon Harlem Globetrotters the whole time.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
They are actually human cartoons.
Speaker 7 (04:46):
Yeah, seriously.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
The Harlem Globetrotters were organized by founder Abe Sapristine and
played their first full season in nineteen twenty nine. They
didn't actually originate in Harlem, but in Chicago. When Sapristine
changed the name, they did it as a hint to
promoters or arenas that the team was comprised solely of
(05:12):
black athletes, the Conceit soon became a touring basketball troop
that was one part athletic endeavor and one part stage show.
After building a good lead against inferior teams, there was
opportunity for showmanship. The trotters might stuff the ball under
their jerseys. They might bounce it off an opponent's head,
(05:35):
or dribble while lying down. They might go full junior
high school and dropkick the ball into the net. But
if that's all you know about the Globe Trotters, you've
only scratched the surface.
Speaker 9 (05:48):
One of the things I didn't note was that in
the late nineteen forties they were unquestionably the best basketball
team in the world. They regularly beat white basketball teams,
including their most famous victories against the best team in
the NBA, the Minneapolis Lakers.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
That's Ben Green, then, is something of an expert in
Globe Trotter's lore.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
He's the author of the two.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Thousand and six book Spinning the Globe, and before he
started the book, he really had no idea how influential,
how good the Globetrotters really were.
Speaker 9 (06:24):
I believe that that had a direct connection to the
integration of the NBA. I mean, the Globe Trotters beat
the Lakers in forty eight and forty nine, and the
very next season the NBA integrated for the first time,
and the first black player to sign an NBA contract
was Sweetwater Clifton, the star center of the Globe Trotters.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
That's right. Despite the tricks, the Trotters were up for
sirious basketball. They played so called serious teams like the Lakers,
and they beat them. Legitimately, they'd play college teams, local teams, anyone.
They toured internationally and helped bring the game of basketball
(07:05):
to new country, some of which needed to have basketballs
or even the court itself shipped over. They even managed
to land Wilt Chamberlain, the legendary NBA player before he
went to that league. They were also wildly popular, so
much so that the NBA would ask the Trotters to
(07:27):
play doubleheader games. The NBA hoped the crowd that showed
up to watch the dazzling performance would stick around for
the league game. When the Trotters finally got on television,
they'd often draw a bigger audience than an NBA broadcast.
Speaker 9 (07:44):
They were legitimately a great basketball team. Back in the day,
they had a monopoly on the best black ball players
in the country. But by the nineteen fifties, when they
started going overseas, I would argue that they were the
most popular and successful sports franchise in the world. I
(08:05):
mean they were traveling all over the world. They were
going to Latin America to Europe. To set you, five
thousand people would show up in a rainstorm in Paris
to watch them practice, they would fill stadiums all over
the world.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
All that travel was one reason why the Trotters eventually
left competitive basketball largely behind them to focus more on
the antics. In addition to shipping balls, they needed to
ship opponents. Basketball was so new to some countries that
they simply couldn't provide any competitive players.
Speaker 6 (08:44):
So the games were not faked at all.
Speaker 9 (08:46):
But what happened was when they started going overseas, there
weren't any basketball teams that a lot of the countries
they were going to.
Speaker 6 (08:53):
I mean, the Globe Trinders introduced.
Speaker 9 (08:55):
Basketball all over the world, and so they had to
take a team with them, and that's when they started
developing basically these stooge teams.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
That shift also meant creating stars out of the guys
who could entertain as well as they played. Guys like
Goose Tatum, who was considered the standout of early Globetrotters,
was a born showman. Come the nineteen sixties, Meadow Lark Lemon,
the star of the team who was once benched when
(09:24):
Sirius basketball was needed, was now dominating the court. So
was Frederick curly Neil, another standout.
Speaker 9 (09:33):
He was being mom and one of the retired Globe
Trotters said that back in the seventies, in his heyday,
he said that he believed that Curly Neil and Muhammad
Ali were the two most recognizable sports figures in the world.
Curly because of his bald head and because he went
all over the world and was on TV with the.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Globe Shoors, and they also had a perpetual rival, the
Washington Generals. The Generals were founded in the early nineteen
fifties by Lewis Klotz, who was nicknamed Red. Klotz was
a good player, though short by basketball standards at about
five feet seven inches. He was a member of the
(10:15):
Baltimore Bullets in nineteen forty eight when they won the
Basketball Association of America Championship, a precursor to the NBA.
He had played for a few different teams who went
up against the Globe Shrotters before forming his own troupe,
which he named after General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Generals
(10:36):
were mainly white, mostly talented, and some were even NBA refugees.
Klotz pulled triple duty. He was team owner, team coach,
and player who could nail long range shots, shooting two
handed and he was able to keep games with the
Trotters competitive, but his main obligation, the team's main obligation,
(11:00):
was being the straight man to their famous rivals. If
both teams are clowning around, it's too much. You need
someone to bounce off of literally in the case of
dribbling off someone's head. So it was understood that while
the Generals could play a good game of basketball, they'd
back off a bit when the Globe Trotters had possession,
(11:23):
enough time for the Trotters to start executing what they
were best known for, the comic routines, which were called rems.
Speaker 6 (11:34):
There were all kinds of gags.
Speaker 9 (11:36):
The most famous one was the confetti in a bucket,
where they made it look like they were going to
throw a bucket of water on somebody in the crowd,
and it was full of confetti. But there was the
ball on a string on a rubber pan they would
come back when you shot a free throw, and just
the wobbly balls. And they'd played going to this baseball
thing where they were actually acting like they were playing baseball.
(11:57):
So in between playing regular good basketball, then there was
all this funny stuff what they called the rims.
Speaker 6 (12:06):
The gag that the Globe Trotters did.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Think of it this way. If the Globetrotter games were musicals,
Reams would be the big musical numbers, all the crazy
ball handling, all the goofing off, and they didn't have
to worry about running up against real defense. The Generals
were also prohibited from pass interference when the ball was
tossed to meadow lark lemon. Together, these restrictions made it
(12:33):
all but impossible for the Generals to mount a victory.
Speaker 9 (12:37):
So they would play in you know, every quarter. There'd
be the first four or five minutes they would just
play basketball, and you know, the Generals would play as
hard as they could as well, but there was like
a signal they knew at a certain point in every
quarter that they would go into this funny stuff, you know,
and that was what they became most famous for them.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
In twenty twenty, a former General named Mickey Greenberg said
that the games could be competitive for a bit before
the Trotters would inevitably take the victory. He could recall
only one time, at a show in Flint, Michigan, in
the late nineteen sixties, that the owner of the Trotters
told the Generals that they could really try to win.
(13:22):
Mickey said that switching from cooperating with the Trotters to
really trying to beat them was hard. The Generals lost
that night, like most every night they played and lost
to the Trotters everywhere from Madison Square Garden to a
leper colony in the Philippines. While Klotz himself said he
(13:44):
never went out to lose any games or was ever
told to lose a game, the loss is piled up, end, up,
and up. You'll recall that by the time nineteen seventy
one rolled around, the Trotters had won two thousand, four
hundred and ninety five games in a row. Their last
(14:04):
recognized loss had come back in nineteen sixty two against
a college team. There were isolated reports of the Generals
winning a game here or there very early on, including
an incident where the scoreboard malfunctioned in nineteen fifty seven,
but no one could really confirm it. Because the Trotters
(14:26):
were more of a show than a sports team, no
one really bothered to keep a running tally or box score,
and come the nineteen sixties, it didn't really matter. The
Generals were Charlie Brown trying to kick a football. The
Globe Trotters were a team of Lucy's pulling it away
at the last second.
Speaker 9 (14:48):
They built this long term business relationship that became really
at that point.
Speaker 6 (14:55):
From that point.
Speaker 9 (14:56):
On, neither the Trotters nor the Generals were playing anybody else.
They just played each other, and the Globe Trotters always
won and the General's always lost.
Speaker 6 (15:08):
That was just kind of the nature of the world
at that point.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Which brings us to Martin, Tennessee, on January fifth, nineteen
seventy one, the date when the natural order.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Of things got turned upside down.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
As a touring show, the Globetrotters were more than willing
to visit smaller towns and venues, which is how the
team wound up at the University of Tennessee at Martin,
a somewhat rural campus in the modestly sized town of Martin.
Martin is currently home to the Tennessee Soybean Festival. At
(15:49):
the time, there were roughly five thousand students.
Speaker 10 (15:53):
It was basically do what you want to do. I mean,
we had some recreation things right off of campus.
Speaker 5 (16:01):
There.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
We had a couple of areas where they had.
Speaker 10 (16:04):
Some many machines and Pool Taie Wolves had a movie
theater and Martin, which was about three blocks from the campus.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
That's Jerry Carpenter.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Jerry was a UTM student who graduated back in nineteen
sixty six. Growing up on a rural farm, he was
the first in his family to attend college. Later, he
began working there as a coach for the golf team
and in other sports programs. Like a lot of Martin residents,
he was intrigued by the Trotters coming to town.
Speaker 10 (16:37):
I had watched them on TV that you know, was extensive.
I got married in sixty six and started to work
here in sixty eight. So whenever they came, you know,
I said, woll it's bally something to go see.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
So I got tickets for me.
Speaker 10 (16:51):
And I had a little brother that was seventeen years
younger than me, and he was about nine or ten
years old at that time.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
Martin isn't exactly a hotbed of entertainment.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
At the time.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
It was a dry town where purchasing alcohol wasn't legal.
Well kind of.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
It's still a dry county.
Speaker 10 (17:11):
We don't have package liquor stores in Wiky County. I
mean you still had your local night spots and all
that you know where you could get that. But now
Folk in Kentucky was only about eight or nine miles away,
and they had three or four package stores over there.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
The Globe Trotters touched down on January fifth, which fell
on a Tuesday. Thanks to their popularity, they managed to
attract thousands of fans to the arena, including Jerry and
his younger brother.
Speaker 10 (17:42):
It was just a small arena, but all of sat
were just right on the floor. I mean, you were
just right there. It was a packed crowd.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
The fans stared at the shiny floor of the court
as the Globe Trotters came in to the sounds of
Sweet Georgia Brown, their theme song and anthem.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
They were greeted with cheers.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
The generals probably were not, we need to say probably because,
as we've mentioned, Sports Illustrated didn't cover the hundreds of
Globetrotter's games played each year, the local press didn't cover it,
and the student press was supposed to be on vacation
that week on account of the holiday. So here's what
(18:22):
we know based on recollections, including Jerry's. But bear in
mind that accounts of this game have usually come well
after the fact. Relying on memory, and memory, as we
all know, is fallible.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
This was fifty four years ago.
Speaker 10 (18:39):
What amazed me was the shots that they took and
they hid it. I mean, I just hadn't seen any
of that, even in the college games that I walked.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
That was what was amazing everybody.
Speaker 10 (18:51):
And then of course it was so entertaining with everything
that they did and talking and carrying on and everything.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Still, there are some things most accounts agree on. For
one thing, something had been building earlier that season and
the Generals had taken the Trotters into overtime another game,
the Trotters won only via a buzzer beater. Tonight, the
Globe Trotters were up to their usual tricks. They dribbled
(19:19):
circles around the hapless Generals, antagonized the referee, and played
to the crowd and just for kicks. We asked our
basketball reporter friend, Izzie Gutierrez of ESPN to recreate the broadcast.
Speaker 11 (19:35):
The Globe Trotters are up to their usual antics, interacting
with the crowd and what appears to be a total
disregard for their opponents. Here comes metal Lark Lemon hitting
a shot from half court. The Generals are helpless to
do anything about it. This is truly the worst team
in all of sports.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Of course, the Globetrotters were often aided by the official
who traveled with the teams and held a clear pro
Globe Trotter bias.
Speaker 10 (20:03):
I won't tell you once I stuck out in my mind,
especially as I went along later on in life and I.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Became a referee. A referee wasn't very good. You know.
Speaker 10 (20:16):
He wasn't exactly straight up on all his call and everything.
As I got older and everything, I thought back on it.
He was part of the show, and of course whatever
he did was arc medalle Ark made it entertaining.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
At halftime, the Globe Trotters were up by twenty to
twenty three points depending on the source, which was pretty
typical of how they fared against the Generals. It was
another route of beating a kind of torture. To be
a Generals fan, if there ever were such a thing,
was to make peace with disappointment.
Speaker 10 (20:50):
I guess I's county naive about the Globe Trotters. I
knew that they always won. Of course, being a young guy,
didn't understand all that that time, But I later on
found out that more or less. The end of the
game has already been decided for ever throw the basketball
hard playing.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
But starting in the third quarter, something began to shift.
Speaker 11 (21:14):
Meadowlark Lemon is looking a little off tonight. That was
an easy layup, but it bounced off the rim. The
Generals have the ball, red cloths scores.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
Meadow Lark, who could sink half court shots the way
normal people can get a lot of paper into a
trash can, couldn't touch the net. The Trotters were still
doing their thing, using the ball as a prop for
their comedy, but the Generals seemed bound and determined to
do what they could hardly ever manage, turn this into
(21:46):
an actual game of basketball.
Speaker 11 (21:49):
It's the end of the third quarter and I can't
believe I'm saying this, but the Generals have closed the
gap against the Globetrotters. This is no longer a game
between professionals and junior varsity players, but an actual even match,
and it's happening right here in Martin, Tennessee.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
The crowd had a sense of change in the air,
and probably a little bit of confusion. Weren't the Globe
Trotters too good to touch? Weren't the Generals just well
stooges in the fourth quarter. The Generals had an answer.
If it wasn't clear already, they didn't come to lose,
(22:24):
not tonight.
Speaker 11 (22:26):
With just a few minutes left in this game, the
Generals have taken a twelve point lead.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Our highly fictitious announcer is correct. The Generals moved ahead
of the Trotters by twelve points late in the game,
not only erasing the comfortable lead the Trotter's built up,
but putting them way behind. And that could mean only
one thing.
Speaker 11 (22:52):
If the Globe Trotters want to take this game, they're
going to have to limit the theatrics and focus on
playing basketball.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Metal lark Lemon.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Drives to the basket. That's good for two. And you
can tell.
Speaker 11 (23:05):
He's feeling the pressure because he didn't stop to pull
down the referees pants.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
As the seconds ticked down.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Whether they realized it or not, the crowd was watching
one of the most suspenseful Globetrotter's games ever. The Trotters surged,
closing that twelve point gap and taking a one point lead,
making the score ninety nine to ninety eight with just
seconds remaining.
Speaker 11 (23:31):
The General's half possession if the clock winds down, they
have just one last chance to score and make history
for the losingest franchise in sports history.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
During a timeout, Red who is by this point fifty
years old, demands the ball. Whether he wanted the glory
or just wanted to avoid a more expendable player getting
canned for making a shot, well, who knows. Clops evades
several Globetrotters pivots, and roughly twenty feet out from the basket, shoots.
Speaker 11 (24:05):
And it's in the General lead one hundred to ninety nine.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
The Generals knew there was just one opportunity to take
the lead. Red Klotz would later say he made the
shot because he was afraid another General's player might not
know what to do miss on purpose. No, that wasn't
what Red Klotz was about. He wanted to play a
sincere game, but he wasn't home free. The Globetrotters take over.
Speaker 11 (24:34):
With three seconds left, Meadowlark Lemon eyes the basket and
takes his shot just as time is about to expire,
and it's no good.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
The Globetrotter's fall. The Washington Generals have won. I don't
believe what I just saw after meadow Lark missed, the
ball went out of bounds, and possession went to the Generals,
who let the time run out. The scoreboard displayed the
most improbable score of all time. The Generals had won
(25:03):
one hundred to ninety nine. So what does Jerry remember.
Speaker 10 (25:09):
I just remember that they took a shot, and the
globe Trotters had been clowning around as usual and everything,
and I think the Generals made a little run and
they made that last shot, and I thought, oh, they
got a score. And I don't remember who shot for
the Globetrotters on the last shot, but they didn't make it,
(25:30):
and the game.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Was over with. Everybody just said, okay, they lost.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
The mood in the campus area was one of confusion.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
The Generals did what?
Speaker 3 (25:41):
But the expression on the faces of the Globetrotters was
all too real. They're a little shot and the Generals, well,
they're elited, but they're also not the heroes in the
eyes of fans. Some accounts, including those of players, mentioned
kids in the audience crying. Others mentioned the crowd booing
(26:02):
this happened. The Globetrotters fell to the Generals, but one
question remains how the fallout of the loss to the
Generals lingered over the next several weeks. One globe Trotter
(26:24):
recalled he thought the entire team was going to get fired.
As the story goes, George Gillette, then owner of the Globetrotters,
boarded a plane so he could personally chastise the players
for losing. This was more than a defeat, This was
jeopardizing a lucrative franchise. Fans came to see the Globetrotters
(26:46):
embarrass the Generals, not get embarrassed themselves. But the team
soon had an idea. They certainly could have buried the
loss entirely. Again, no one was really around to make
it a national story. The team could have simply opted
to ignore it and move on. Instead, they did the opposite.
(27:08):
In an interview with a journalist in Shreveport, Louisiana, just
a week later, the team's business manager, Chuck McKay, accepted
the loss quote they kind of surprised the Globetrotters when
a few of the former collegians scored in high figures.
McKay said, why acknowledge it for a good reason. Knowing
(27:30):
the Globetrotters could lose kept the games more interesting. It
was no longer a foregone conclusion that trotters would succeed
pay to see a game, and maybe, just maybe the
underdogs could claw and scratch their way to another upset.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
But how did it happen in.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
The first place. Globe Trotter's historians, players, and eyewitnesses have
offered differing accounts over the decades. Like a Globe Trotter's Raschiman,
everyone seems to have a different reason for how the
generals pulled off the upset of the century.
Speaker 10 (28:09):
I thank you for something that just slipped up on
the end. And maybe it was a shot made it
wasn't supposed to be made, or somebody was supposed to
be guarding somebody and they didn't. You know, that's just
something that happened.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Of course, the best people to ask would be the
players themselves. Unfortunately, many from both teams have passed away
in the preceding decades. We reached out to the National
Basketball Retired Players Association, which counts the teams among their alumni,
but no one surfaced who had any recollection of the game,
(28:44):
but some did have their perspective on the game. Documented.
One story that keeps getting repeated is that somehow, somewhere
the teams got into a personal dispute. It comes from
Rory Keevil, a Washington General's player who spoke with journalist
Tom Condon of the Hartford Current in two thousand. Kievel
(29:07):
said the travel schedule had been long and that the
two teams were quote a little chapped at one another,
though he doesn't recall why. Remember, the Globetrotters were the stars.
The Generals made a fraction of what the Trotters got.
They had underdog energy. Maybe being paid less finally got
(29:29):
to them one night. Ben Green isn't sure about the
animosity between the teams, and some other elements of these
stories don't quite add up. One player remembers Globetrotter's owner
Abe Sapristein, threatening to fire the Generals in the locker
room afterward, but Abe Sapristein had died five years earlier.
(29:53):
Ben does believe there was animosity between the Globetrotters, well
one Globetrotter and everyone else. Ben believes meadow Lark Lemon
wasn't well liked by the rest of the Trotters, that
he took too much of his style from his predecessor,
goose Tatum and wasn't a very good straight basketball player.
(30:15):
He had an ego, a chiff on his shoulder. It
was in many ways the meadow Lark Show, and meadow
Lark liked it that way. And according to Ben, the
night in Martin was a night when meadow Lark wanted
to stick it to the generals.
Speaker 9 (30:33):
The generals are gonna let the Glow Trotters win. And
then basically metal Arc showed his ass. This is kind
of the way we had Klass described it. Metal Arc
just said, Hey, we're going to really take it to
the generals. So he wanted to make a point and
read kind of said, okay, let's bring it on. So
(30:55):
he told his players, let's play to win, and that's
why it happened. It all happened because of Pedal Ark,
and at that point they started playing real basketball version.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
Meadow Lark is throwing down the gauntlet. Let's drop the
theatrics and play for real. Maybe because, as roy Kievil said,
there was some personal beef and maybe he and the
rest of the Trotters weren't prepared for the Generals to
put up a fight, leading to their undoing. Others put
(31:29):
the blame for the loss on the absence of Curly Neil,
the Globe Trotter's other marquee player. But Neil's presence there
is a question mark. Neil himself told Ben Green he
wasn't playing. In other interviews he places himself there fairness
to Curly. When you play hundreds of games a year,
(31:50):
you probably don't know which town you were in. We
can also look to the memories of Red Klotz. Red,
like many of the players, had passed, but his account
of the game was documented in the book The Legend
of Red Klotz by author Tis him Kelly and in
an interview with Ben Green. In Red's telling, the Globe
(32:12):
Trotters were having an off night, looking as sluggish. A
General's player named Sam Sawyer was guarding meadow lark Lemon
exceptionally well, shutting down his rapid fire offense. The Generals
were motivated, grabbing rebound after rebound. The rim, according to Klotz,
was as big as a garbage candle lid. That night,
(32:35):
the Trotters couldn't get going, but the Generals couldn't miss
it was, Klotz remembered, as if they had just killed
Santa Claus, but no in.
Speaker 9 (32:46):
Read, Red would want to take the last shot because
he knew he was good and he had a complete
confidence that he would hit it.
Speaker 6 (32:53):
So he hits the shot.
Speaker 9 (32:55):
The buzzer finally sounds, and the way he told the story,
there's just this dead silence, like the crowds is just
in disbelief.
Speaker 6 (33:06):
They don't know what's happened.
Speaker 9 (33:07):
Nobody knows what to do because there's no script for this.
Speaker 6 (33:13):
That wait, the game is over.
Speaker 9 (33:15):
In the globe, chatter's left and read was afraid there
might be a riot or something.
Speaker 6 (33:20):
He' tell me kind of rushed his team off the court.
He said, let's get out of here.
Speaker 9 (33:25):
Let's get back in the dress room, because he was
afraid of what might happen.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
There's another source of information on the game. It comes
from a twenty eighteen story from the University of Tennessee
at Martin Campus News, which looked back at the game
in a retrospective and interviewed several people who were there,
both utm students and residents. The picture is interesting according
(33:53):
to married couple Dick and Barbara Hutcherson School alumni, who
went to the game with their young son. The Trotters
never took a big lead, the game remained competitive, and
the couple felt that well, it was all part of
the show. It was supposed to be suspenseful before the
Trotters pulled off the victory. And when Red Clots hit
(34:15):
that game winning shot, well, the Hutchersons felt that maybe
Red wasn't supposed to make that shot. Others in attendance
felt that way too. It was a mistake. The Trotters
were just goofing off a little too much. And the
shot that Lemon took that could have sensed a victory,
(34:35):
he took a half court hook shot, hard for even
a Globe Trotter to nail. Now, all of these accounts
have one thing in common. They're trying to recall details
of a game that's way in the rear view. To
find out what really happened that night, you'd need a
time machine. You'd need someone who was jotting down whatever
(34:59):
details they could as soon as the game was over.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
But, like we keep.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Saying, covering Globe Trotters wasn't really part of anyone's sports beat.
But then we got an interesting email from the good
people at UTM, the people who helped connect us with
Jerry Carpenter. Their public relations person had dug up something
no one had seen in over fifty years, and it
(35:27):
kind of blew our minds. The Globetrotters definitely lost that night,
but they didn't play the Washington Generals. At the time
the Globe Trotters visited the UTM Arena in January nineteen
(35:47):
seventy one, Aaron Tatum was a freshman. He was also
writing for The Valette, the school's newspaper.
Speaker 5 (35:55):
I was on the campus newspaper the first year. Within
a couple of months I was freshman, signed the newly
created position of Fine arts editor and say that I
knew a lot about fine arts, but as it turned out,
they sort of immersed myself went to New York and
saw all your museums up there for about a week
(36:16):
or two around Christmas to get myself a bit educated.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
That to Aaron, under normal circumstances, Aaron wouldn't be the
guy to dispatch to any sporting event, let alone the
Globe Trotters. But on this night, the Valette was down
one sports reporter.
Speaker 5 (36:34):
Just to bring it into the focus, here was really
something that the sports editor came to me at the
last minute. He says, our sports reporter is sick or
having to leave campus, something was going on with his family.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
I can't remember.
Speaker 5 (36:52):
Came to me about an hour or two before the game,
and I'd already seen the Globe Trotters, I guess three
or four years before, and sort of was tempted to
go ahead and pay for a ticket, but I'm pretty
conservative and pretty cheap. First question Dennis was, well, that
means I'm going to get in free.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
The answer was yes. Aaron played a little basketball when
he was younger, and had been a fan of the
Philadelphia seventy six ers. He knew enough about the game
to get by. What's remarkable about his attendance is that,
unlike virtually everyone else watching, he was really paying attention
(37:31):
and had to write it all down afterward, so, some
fifty years on, even though he doesn't remember a whole
lot about it now, the other Aaron, the young reporter.
Aaron scribbled things down right away. It was published just
days later in the January thirteenth, nineteen seventy one edition
(37:54):
of The Vallette under the headline Trotter's Net more humor
than points, and as far as we know, it's the
most accurate account of the game ever recorded.
Speaker 5 (38:06):
And I've I think I featured that in what I
turned in to the paper, But I do recall we
had an advisor for the paper who really believed in
the truism of if dog bites man, it's not a story.
If man bites dog, it's a story. And I believe that.
But he was excessive about He says we got a
(38:27):
lead with the fact that they got beat.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Maybe the most interesting thing about Aaron's account is that
the Globe Trotters didn't play the Generals. Well. They did,
let me explain. Oftentimes Redklots would have his team don
the jerseys and the name of another franchise, and an
effort to mix things up make it seem like the
(38:51):
Trotters were playing a whole league of teams instead of
the same happless opponents every night. Sometimes they were the
Boston Shamrocks, other times the Baltimore Rockets. In Martin they
were appearing as the New Jersey Reds. But what about
the game itself. Here's Aaron reading an excerpt of his story.
Speaker 5 (39:13):
Curly Neil displayed his famous dribbling act for a few
seconds in the fourth quarter and scored on some long
shots from as far back as the mid court line.
Meadowlark was a continuous clatter of chatter, specializing many successful
over the shoulder shots. The game was, without it out,
fixed for the Globe Trotters to win, but this time
the plan was a little too late.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Wait, Curly Neil, the Curly Neil that wasn't supposed to
have been there that night.
Speaker 5 (39:40):
I think I distinctly remember Curly Neil being there. I mean,
he's not someone you could forget easy.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Not really Curly. Remember it was once compared to Mohammad
Ali on the fame scale. That's important because Curly's absence
has been widely cited as a key reason for the Trotters.
Losing his presence makes the Generals or Reds win even
more impressive. Aaron also mentions the Trotters had a twenty
(40:10):
point head in the third quarter, which tracks with other accounts.
They were well on their way to winning, like they
always do. But here's what Aaron saw that provides what
might be the single biggest reason for the Trotters coming
up short that night.
Speaker 5 (40:28):
It's quite obvious that the announcer who traveled with the
troop along with the referee and the opposing team, hopes
to give some extra time to allow the Globe Totters
to win. As soon as the buzzer sounded after a
series of timeouts in one second left, the announcer called
back to play himself as soon as he saw the
Globe Trotters weren't able to get the fall.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
This is another part of the Globe Trotter's lore. The
clock would often be stopped during their reams, along with
other timekeeping manipulation to give the Trotters an edge, but
for some reason it wasn't quite working that night, so
by the end they were literally trying to not only
stop the clock, but wind it back entirely.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
This tracks with what.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
Red Cloths once said that the Globetrotters argued no one
had touched an inbound pass and the clock shouldn't have
run out. Apparently, the Globetrotters gave themselves a do over,
one final chance to keep their record intact.
Speaker 5 (41:31):
The Reds were still in obsession from their own court.
The play was called back, tried again, but the same
action took place and the game was over.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
The problem it didn't work. The Trotters got two chances
to win the game two and they flopped both times.
Would a third restart have been too egregious even for
the Harlem Globetrotters. Maybe, or maybe the team felt it
was finally time to acknowledge the generals. While read as
(42:01):
worthy adversaries, they played a good and real game of basketball.
And what's noteworthy about their victory isn't just that they
beat the vastly better team. They beat the vastly better
team that could literally get a second chance when things
weren't going their way. Their aura of invincibility was shattered,
(42:25):
at least for the crowd in attendance. Did it matter
for the Trotters?
Speaker 2 (42:30):
Not really.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
They went on to have another spectacularly successful decade, touring,
doing a television variety show, and then being relegated somewhat
to the sidelines. As the NBA grew and grew, It
wasn't so much that they didn't look like the NBA
as much as the NBA started to look like the Globetrotters.
(42:53):
Here's Ben Green.
Speaker 9 (42:54):
Like, the NBA was playing Globetrotter basketball. You know, they
were running the fast break and shooting from downtown, and
there were dunks and all this really high flying style
that was really Globetrotter basketball. The ABA, the American Basketball Association,
was much more like the Globetrotters, and they were sort
(43:14):
of a transition to when the NBA began to play
that way as well. But eventually, like you were getting
to you didn't have to go to see the Globetrotters
to see dunks and three point shots and entertaining basketball
because the NBA was doing that as well.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
They wouldn't lose again until nineteen ninety five, when a
loss ended an eight thousand, eight hundred and twenty nine
game winning streak that began with the very next game
against the Generals back in nineteen seventy one. That loss
didn't come at the hands of the Generals, however, but
to an all star team of former NBA players at
(43:54):
a game in Vienna, Austria, led.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
By Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
Speaker 3 (43:58):
But that nineteen seventy one win mattered plenty to the
Generals and to Red Klotz. Red always wanted to be
the Trotters, always suited up with that on his mind.
A combination of talent, luck, and some unsuccessful cheating gave
him his moment, one Hugh relished. It was also one
(44:22):
the people won't soon forget, even if some of the
details are lost to time. Jerry Carpenter hasn't forgotten, nor
has Aaron Tatum, now, a novelist whose book Shakespeare's Secrets
we promised to mention, and which uses scholarly evidence to
explore the idea Shakespeare didn't write all of his own work.
Speaker 5 (44:44):
I'm not going to reveal who our man is because
that'll take away part of the excitement of going out
and buying the novel and reading it yourself. Right, I'm
not going to I'm not going to say it on.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
The air here.
Speaker 3 (44:57):
Before every game against the Trotters, Red Klotts told his
team the same thing, let's go win in Martin, Tennessee.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
They finally did.
Speaker 10 (45:08):
It's a lot of fun to watch as the years
have gone on. Say, I saw the one game but
the Globe Trotter's lost.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
I was there.
Speaker 10 (45:16):
I've talked to some people as I refereed basketball in
the area. You know, did you happen to be at
the game when the Globetrotter's playing, and a lot of
people from the towns around here. Yes, I was there.
I saw the game and enjoyed it very much.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
There's no evidence the Generals Ever beat the Globetrotters again.
Their record, which can only be estimated sands at over
seventeen thousand losses. Statistically, there's probably a better chance of
being hit by lightning than seeing the team ever squeak
out another victory. But for one glorious night in rural Tennessee,
(45:55):
the underdogs got to raise their hands in victory. There
was just one drawback. Martin, being a dry town, didn't
have any champagne available.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
The Generals had to settle for soda.
Speaker 4 (46:10):
There are so many sports stories about someone coming in
off the bench and filling in for an injured player
and making history. And Tom Brady stepped in for Drew
Bledsoe and Luke Garrick stepping in for Wally Pip. I
want to put our guy, Aaron Tatum of the student
newspaper in there.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
He was supposed to be there.
Speaker 4 (46:28):
No, he is the reason.
Speaker 3 (46:30):
We know did a great job too. That's real journalism,
is what that is. That's journal on a bench stepping
in covering the game.
Speaker 7 (46:38):
You barely understand the fine arts reporter.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
I loved it.
Speaker 3 (46:41):
Saren, are we casting anyone?
Speaker 6 (46:43):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (46:43):
Yeah? Actually I did?
Speaker 7 (46:45):
I have some casting on this because I loved Red Klotz,
the coaching player for the Washington Generals, and I was like,
the whole line that was it was as if Klotz
remembered they had just killed Santa Claus. I was like, okay,
I got to do right by Red Klotz. So I
picked Paul Rudd. Now just picture him in fifties basketball
shorts and Converse high tops. I'm right, so extig me,
(47:05):
yeah boom, and now he's like out there shooting like
the granny shots. So that was my pick for him.
For Metal Lark Lemon, I went with Jamie Fox with
a big afro. I thought he's got the right physicality.
And then for Curly Neil, I thought Bukeem Woodbine, who
is by the way from Harlem, even the Globetrotters are not.
And then for Aaron Tatum, the school newspaper reporter, I thought,
(47:25):
this is just a fun one for me. Tom Holland
who played Spider Man, but we never got to see
him as a reporter, so now we get to see
him as a reporter.
Speaker 3 (47:32):
So there you go, Wow, kid reporter I love.
Speaker 8 (47:34):
I mean, he's like a probably like thirty five at
this point.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
It's always going to be a kid good Totally.
Speaker 7 (47:40):
Do you guys, are any very special characters from this one?
Speaker 8 (47:42):
You know what I'm gonna go, Tatum. I love a
journalist taking notes. I love like I started.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
When I graduated college, like not ever like a real journalist,
but in in journalism, and so I really do admire that,
like boots on the ground, like I'm getting a source,
I'm reporting a story because I saw it firsthand.
Speaker 1 (48:01):
Totally.
Speaker 7 (48:02):
I was imagining the steno Patty's flipping through to write
his notes. In My very special character was Will Chamberlain
as a Harlem glowstrotterer.
Speaker 1 (48:09):
I was like, are you kidding me?
Speaker 7 (48:10):
And also I was having fun imagining if they ever
lost while he was on the team. I don't think
you could ever live that down.
Speaker 8 (48:15):
I remember my husband loves basketball, and I did want
to ask him whether it was against the rules in
real basketball to give a player on your team uppies
to lift him up so that he could jump. And
it turns out, yes, that is against the rule. You're
not allowed to give a player on your own team uppies.
Speaker 7 (48:32):
It's a great question, though. I love that question.
Speaker 4 (48:34):
I'm going to give my very special character to the
many people on eBay. I've just discovered who make knockoff
Washington General's throwback jerseys.
Speaker 6 (48:44):
You.
Speaker 4 (48:44):
I was wondering, now we need to add some point
level up where we're getting prop contents for each of
these recordings. And I'd love to get all of you
Washington General's outfits. And if we get that budget allowance,
there are plenty of eBay sellers ready to.
Speaker 7 (49:00):
Meet that need.
Speaker 8 (49:01):
Do they make them in onesie sizes? Can I have
a large yes?
Speaker 4 (49:06):
So that we might need to just get very special
episodes is made by some very special people. Today's episode
is a Jake Rosson special. Jake have written many of
our most popular episodes, including Et and Me about the
eleven year old who helped bring Et to life, and
Super Streaker about the Tom Brady of streaking. I've mentioned
(49:27):
this before, I think, but Jake wrote a book called
Action Park. The subtitle is Fast Times, Wild Rides and
the Untold Story of America's most Dangerous Amusement Park. You
should get it for your summer reading list. Our show
is hosted by Danis Schwartz, Zaren Burnett, and Jason English.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Our producer is Josh.
Speaker 4 (49:46):
Fisher Editing and sound design by Jonathan Washington. Mixing and
mastering by Jonathan Washington. Additional editing by Mary Doo, original
music by Elise McCoy. Show logo by Lucy Kintonia. Our
executive producer is Jason English. You'd like to email the
show tell us about the time you were seriously injured
at Action Park. You can reach us at Very Special
(50:08):
Episodes at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
I'll board the Action part. Emails to Jake.
Speaker 4 (50:13):
Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Zaron Burnett
Dana Schwartz
Jason English
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